She doesn't remember much about her mother because she was 4 years old when Henrietta died. She and Rebecca (the author) found some of Henrietta's medical records. This medical record is the closest Deborah can get to her mother. View their surgeries, past diagnoses, treatments, and more. These items aren't that important to everyone but they seem to play a pretty important role in the book. The reason these papers are so important is so Deborah can get closer to her mother and learn more through her medical records. But after a while, Deborah and Rebecca get their hands on real HeLa cells. What was the jackpot, forget the medical records, was technically Henrietta. “My God, I never thought I'd see my mother under a microscope, I never imagined this day would come” (Skloot 266). These papers are the only ones Deborah has to remember her by.